Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting

Andrew Sullivan for The New York TimesA statue of Nathan Hale on Yale’s Old Campus.

Marina Keegan is a senior English major in the writing concentration at Yale University.

NEW HAVEN — Last May, one of the largest hedge funds in the world paid me $100 to eat gourmet popcorn and explain why I wasn’t applying for one of its (lucrative!) jobs. As I sat in a hotel suite with six other Yale students – musicians, biologists, dramatists, other-ists – and answered questions about my future plans, I got this uneasy feeling that the man in the beautiful suit was going to take my Hopes and Dreams back to some lab to figure out the best way to crush them.

And indeed, they have it down to a science. Each fall, our country’s top-tier banks and consulting firms cram New Haven’s best hotels with the best and brightest to lure them with a series of superlatives: the greatest job, the most money, the easiest application, the fanciest popcorn.

They’re good at it. They’re unbelievably, remarkably, terrifyingly good at it. Every year around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates enter the consulting and finance industries. At Harvard and Stanford, the numbers are even higher.

When I arrived at Yale as an eager 18 year old, I had never even heard of consulting or I-banking. And to be honest, I still didn’t totally understand the function of a hedge fund. But what I do understand is that students here have passion. Passion for public service and education policy and painting and engineering and entrepreneurialism. Standing outside a freshman dorm, I couldn’t find a single student aspiring to be a banker – but at commencement this May, there’s a 50 percent chance I’ll be sitting next to one. This strikes me as incredibly sad.

So what happens? Sometime between freshman fall and senior spring, an insane number of students decide – one way or another – that entering the banking industry makes a whole lot of sense. A few weeks ago I interviewed over 20 Yalies to try to figure out why.

What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important.

Of course, none of us are actually special. The important thing is that we go to a top-tier school and they recruit at top-tier schools and their recruitment is pretty darn smart. They understand that it’s no longer “cool” to explicitly seek wealth. Our generation inherited a kind of corporate hate from the ’60s and ’70s that dissuades most students at schools like Harvard and Yale from working for corporations after graduation. But we will work for banks and hedge funds because they’re marketed to us (quite strategically) as something to merely do for a few years — as a perfect way to gain skills for a future career in somehow saving the world.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life. But what I heard again and again was that working at JPMorgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good.

Why do students believe this? Because the recruiters tell them it’s true. Personally, I think it’s ridiculous. Those skills can be gained elsewhere. I’m just not convinced that the most productive use of 25 percent of my graduating class’s time is to spend two or three years pushing figures around spreadsheets to make more money for those with the most money.

And I’m not alone. The expansion of Occupy Everywhere has come hand in hand with a rise in college students looking critically at their schools’ recruitment policies. A group of Stanford students are starting a national student organization called Stop the Brain Drain committed to empowering “more young people to solve America’s greatest challenges” by combating Wall Street recruitment, and a series of op-eds have been popping up in campus papers across the country trying to do the same.

One of those articles was mine. Expecting to receive hate mail, I was shocked when I was instead bombarded by upward of 100 e-mails from peers across the country who sympathized with the idea that these statistics don’t have to be inevitable.

Is working for a bank inherently evil? Probably not. But the fact that such a large percentage of students at top-tier schools enter an industry that isn’t contributing, creating or improving much of anything saddens me.

Twenty-five percent is not a joke. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of talent and energy and potential that could be used somewhere other than crunching numbers to generate wealth. Perhaps there won’t be fancy popcorn at some other job – but it’s about time we started popping it for ourselves.